Prairie drama sings familiar song

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This article was published 10/04/2015 (4165 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

The truck-stop waitress fuels the drivers with coffee as she listens to their endless stories of the faraway places the road out of town has taken them.

The attentive server, Sylvia — the central character of Theatre Projects Manitoba’s season-closing production, I Dream of Diesel — wistfully laments that she is the most well-travelled woman who has never gone anywhere.

When Joe, the persistent trucker, begins paying attention to her, they strike up a long-distance relationship, effectively represented by each of them pegging a string of air-mail letters on a clothesline that they propel at each other from across the Rachel Browne Theatre stage.

The scene captures the likable essence of the new Prairie drama, a collaborative creation by the independent Winnipeg stage troupe One Trunk Theatre. While the story fashioned by the co-writing trio of Gwendolyn Collins, Andraea Sartison and Claire Thérèse Friesen may come across as authentic, it is not particularly engrossing, perhaps due to having multiple cooks, which stunts a dominant individual vision.

Of more interest is the way it is told.

First, there’s the accompaniment of the evocative songs of Winnipeg tunesmith Scott Nolan, who inspired the creators with his fertile songbook. The title is a line taken from his number Daytime Moon, from his 2005 album No Bourbon & Bad Radio.

His sparse, intimate material about endless touring is well-suited to a stage ode to the perpetual fascination with rolling down the road. (Nolan was in the opening-night audience Thursday and warmed up the audience with a tasty, two-song set.)

Sartison, also the director, brings an appealing, low-fi quality to the storytelling that is enhanced by a solid cast of local actors. Dominating the stage are three large sheets on which lighting designer Hugh Conacher projects background scenes that often capture the amazing breadth of the Prairies, called the “poor man’s ocean” in the 100-minute production.

Conacher’s splendid visuals of swaying wheat fields and big sky lend Diesel its distance, which is a key theme. This imaginative style of presentation jacks up the visual interest, as characters seamlessly interact with the video or shadowed figures on the other side of the makeshift screens.

The whirlwind romance of Sylvia (played by Friesen) and the sweet-talking Joe (Justin Otto) culminates with a wedding ring left for her on his coffee spoon. He proposes with the words she has been longing to hear — “I want you beside me on every road” — as they make plans to head out immediately for California.

Their California dreaming is abruptly detoured by a phone call that Joe’s mother Dolly (Collins) has died in a car accident. They must make a side trip to the family farm for the funeral.

There Sylvia encounters Joe’s ornery father, Frank (Arne MacPherson), guilt-ridden by the part he might have played in his wife’s death and still angry only one of his two sons stayed home to help with the farm.

The other brother, the easygoing Danny (Karl Thordarson), acts as peacekeeper. When Joe is called away for one last run to Toronto, Sylvia is left in an unwelcoming household, where it is Frank’s way or the highway.

Sylvia, initially viewed with suspicion by Frank, begins to earn her keep by serving coffee and meals to her men, much as she did at the diner — except this time, she doesn’t get tips. She came to the farm for the love of a man and develops a deep affection for the land. Joe, meanwhile, keeps his distance by accepting a series of “one more” long-haul jobs.

Nolan explains with the lyric, “Sometimes two hearts beat stronger when they’re farther away.”

Friesen, not well known outside the indie scene, anchors Diesel with an empathetic portrait of a wide-eyed woman searching the horizon for something better — a place of her own, whether that is in the passenger seat of some 18-wheeler or helping out with harvesting.

Otto, having a busy first year out of the University of Winnipeg, is solid as the enthusiastic Joe, the title daydreamer — the type Joni Mitchell called “a prisoner of the white lines on the freeway.”

MacPherson brings his usual gravitas to the one-note role of a mostly grumpy SOB whose tormented soul is revealed through the memories of his wife played out onstage. Thordarson exudes a salt-of-the-earth quality that makes him an ideal match for Sylvia.

That might be in Sylvia’s dreams and fodder for another Nolan song down the road.

kevin.prokosh@freepress.mb.ca